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Watch the Skies
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Watch the Skies
Summer weather, holidays and plagues have left us with a skeletal City State Entertainment (CSE) but that didn’t stop them from getting us our weekly update featuring steamy streams, community management and a vile villain for me to opine over. It was a bit shorter than usual but it had pretty pictures in it so I didn’t mind. Here’s one below showing what testers are doing with the ever more impressive C.U.B.E.
Comments
Just rough art concepts is all i ever see or some landscape screenshot.. i don't even see beta happening up this coming October/November and that's if everything goes smoothly and with a bit of luck. Maybe December of this year...is what i'm thinking
I really think they took on more they could handle, decided to build a in-house engine with such a small team of coders, i think MJ bit off more then he could chew and now City State is here in the middle of summer with a game nowhere near playable . So i look back and wonder how in the hell did they think last winter was a timetable for beta??? It's nowhere even near alpha from the looks of it.
Just sad because there was so much hype for this game and i'm pretty sure it's dying down, i know a few people myself that invested in the game have now asked for refunds myself including.
I then take notice of a game called Crowfall which was announced way after CU and they have a actual playable product and even some gameplay video, now i know they went with a bought game engine but hey... progress is progress, at least they have something that's nearly playable...even if it's just for combat testing.
Then you got CSE over here posting concept art of swords and this minecraft style housing stuff that looks horrid , which i'm pretty sure is very early stuff but still...it's not pretty and nowhere near even ready. This game has huge promises and as a oldschool DAoC player i was extremely happy to hear about the creation of this game but now hearing delay and delay and apologies, i'm over it. This game has got another 1+ years at the very least of development before we'll get anything that could be a released product. At least we have Crowfall to look forward to , to whet out appetites for a realm-driven PvP styled game. Great to tune into their twitch to watch them play some homemade style cardgame while on break. I'm sure we'll see a incoming "another delay" live stream soon
See Hellgate: London, Vanguard: SoH and several others to see the results of releasing an unfinished product on their fans. Vanguard was actually fixed up and from what I understand was a very good game about a year after release, but it was too late. Same scenario applies to H: L.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
Half the time when I see these screenshots I'm not sure if its CU or Trove.
This.
But only time will tell if it was all worth it though.
They (we) can still hope it will play to their advantage in the end.
While I'm also looking forward to Crowfall, I'm just not super confident in Unity's ability to handle a couple hundreds of player characters at once on screen along with destruction,etc. Things have probably progressed on that end and people will probably tell me I'm wrong and it can run smoothly, but I will believe it when I see it.
So here we are.
On one end we have playable "demos" that show up a bit more about combat gameplay and "pretty lights", and on the other we have a tech. demo that focus on laying the basis for a real RvR game with lots of players from all factions all regrouped in a small place with destruction, physics, etc.
None is close to be where it should be for our impatient kind... and both could still hit a wall.
There are also some simple methods to make flat or blocky materials look more textured, like tessellation, and it can make a big difference:
While in testing and development people have infinite and instant resources. People have instant build times, there is no material and tool degradation. There are no wars burning the places down and there are no constraints on the size of constructs or how much land they occupy.
All that will change come real time play. As one who has tested the prototype of slower building even without the needed time to gather the materials. It totally changed my scope and material choices while building. Once all the limitations are put into the building system and it takes 6 to 18 months to build some of these grandiose extravagant structures. Then more realistic and less costly structures will be the mainstay of all structures in the game.
So do not fret, reality will bring things back down to earth for in game player made constructs.
Nanulak
But with the amount of coders they had and the work that was needed, it was just a head scratching decision. I mean they kept saying "Beta this winter" then "Beta this spring" , now i'm just seeing actually modeling for weapons...so what even in the hell gave them any idea what they'd have the game even near in beta condition is beyond me.
I'm already preparing myself for another beta delayed video and they'll say early fall, but in the end i don't see it until probably after Christmas.
I still think MJ's vision was just too big, over 30 classes...5-6 different races per-realm, the ability builder, i mean even a team with Blizzard money would have their hands full with this type of game. It just bums me out because my hype has completely dwindled, i still read the newsletters and try to watch these twitch streams but...i just don't care anymore.
You must be joking, it looks absolutely nothing like Trove.
I actually think MJs vision is relatively narrow in comparison to most MMOs, but maybe that is because MJ is focusing on systems whereas most MMOs focus on content. MJ may be creating some complicated systems for CU, but he doesn't have to create 5000 meaningless quests, complicated raids, dungeons etc.
I personally don't think Blizzard would have the capability to build CU, not due to funding but due to lack of vision. Blizzard are the kings of accessibility and nothing else. They take existing ideas / gameplay / mechanics and make them accessible for the masses.
This is why CSE are having delays. They aren't being derivative, they are breaking the mould and creating entirely new systems and ways of making an MMO. These systems are so complicated that of course there are going to be delays due to unforeseen issues.
I still have faith that CU will launch and be a successful product in relation to its budget. Yeh, we're going to have to wait a long time still and that sucks, but I'm happy to wait for the right game as I'm fed up of current MMO market. I also think CU will be a bigger success than Crowfall. CF, by buying existing engines that aren't designed for mass pvp, are just setting themselves up for failure. It may allow them to develop quicker and release the game quicker, but the end product just wont be suited to the games goals as well as CUs will.
For instance in the above shots, if you look at the handrails in the shot with the character on the bridge, the railing should fit in the char's hand but is actually half as thick as he is high. It's just totally out of whack in terms of size and that is what mainly ruins the immersion and makes it looks so clunky.
Same goes for the main structure of the bridge, the beams are just big beams three times as thick as the character with no detail on them, plus the textures are unoriented (looks like they use triplanar mapping) and thus can not add true detail.
Landmark had the same issue and added mesh based objects to for details. I am guessing they will choose a similar approach and then most of these complaints will cease. Right now it just looks clunky and undetailed, but that's ok at this early stage and will hopefully change.
Yep, the delays have sucked. Such is life. Suck it up buttercups.
Thus, I will wait for official release of this game.
I disagree with the critique part. Any media you put out, will be critiqued. That's just how it works. It's part of going public so early. They won't lose a drop of sweat over it.
The delays don't phase me at all, kinda expect them from KS projects. They can't plan ahead as exactly as a big project with a fixed-from-the-start budget could, it's all more fluid.
Plus with a smaller team, every little hickup has a more pronounced effect (like for instance when they couldn't find good programmers for a while). Poop happens, always. Harder to compensate if you are pushing the limits already.
CU budget comes almost entirely from backers' pledges and founders' contribution, there was already a huge pool of potential backers (former WAR & DAoC players), it used traditional development (engine & server tech > systems > art) with NDA and in-house tech.
CF budget comes in majority from venture capital (~61%), the pool of potential backers for CF was smaller (mostly former Shadowbane and DF players), and it used non traditional development (art > systems & tech) with no NDA and existing tech.
Right now CF may look more polished than CU but it's not necessarily representative of greater progress or earlier launch date, I think it simply reflects the choices mentioned above that those studios made to build their game.
In CU we can render about 600 bots in a small area with hundreds of structures, hundreds of trees and objects, very large maps, etc. at ~30 fps, while in CF the characters and environment look polished, but with 30 characters on screen, one large structure, a few monsters and a pretty small map, the FPS often drop at less than 30.
We'll see how things go until launch, but I'm confident Camelot Unchained is going to be a very high quality MMORPG with great graphics, performances and gameplay. "When?" is my only concern. =P
I am content to wait, there aren't any games on the market that interest me right now.
Ps- I think cube looks amazing. As a more pve player than pvp player, I think cube is going to add so much depth and repay ability . Can't wait! (get it?
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
Wouldn't it make more sense to cite games that have outright failed to produce anything rather then something that is still in production and HAS produced something as a reason to dislike crowdfunded projects?